As we are coming upon the last 3 months of the Race in Cambodia, I wanted to look into the recent history of Cambodia. I think that this is very important to know, especially without being able to communicate well/at all with the new language. By knowing the people’s past, it lets me see how I can try to understand the situation they are in where they are coming from. I never thought about doing this for the other countries we went to, but after hearing about the genocide that happened about 45 years ago I knew that I should look at their past. Even though 45 years ago is a long time ago, it will affect the people we will be interacting with. Over half of the population is under the age of 20. With this being said, there also aren’t many people around the age of 50. It is mostly a young or old population, no in between.
So… Genocide… What is it? The definition of a genocide is: The deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation.
First, I will make clear who quickly overtook Cambodia and the reasons that they had for doing so. The Khmer Rouge was headed by Pol Pot. Pol Pot, the future Khmer Rouge leader returned to Cambodia after completing a scholarship in France. He and other younger French-educated Cambodian communists took over the leadership of the more orthodox (pro-Vietnamese) Workers’ Party of Kampuchea, which had led the independence struggle against French colonialism while they were back in Paris. They changed that name to ‘Communist Party of Kampuchea’ in 1966. They started everything by staging an uprising against Prince Norodom Sihanouk’s neutralist government.
The Sihanouk enabled the French-educated Khmers of the elite background, led by Pol Pot, to harness the home grown veterans of the independence struggle to its plans for rebellion in 1967-1968.
In 1969, the United States did a secret bombardment of Vietnamese strongholds in Cambodia. Because about 150,000 Cambodians became casualties, U.S. Congress halted the operation. The Khmer Rouge leaders used the images and the destruction as propaganda to push their motive to purge all of the Vietnamese people from the country. The Khmer Rouge used the tactic of purging the lower districts and communities before purging the Zone party leadership. In total there are 4 Zone Parties and with how many people were somewhat behind the killings from the propaganda, they took over the government. All leadership/officials that were against the regime, were terminated and replaced by allegiant members of the Regime.
The genocide had only just begun. The ideology was; Cambodia didn’t need to learn or import anything from its neighbors. Rather, they would recover its pre-Buddhist glory by rebuilding the powerful economy of the medieval Angkor kingdom and regain ‘lost territory’ from Vietnam and Thailand.
In turn, they cut off all communication of the people with the rest of the world. All people that were educated had to die, for they saw them as a threat to the regime. With this, there are many stories of people acting crazy to escape death.
The genocide was against 3 main categories, the religious group, ethnic groups, and a part of the majority national group. Buddhism was eradicated from the country in just one year, the Vietnamese, Chinese, and Muslim Chans were targeted, and both “base citizens”-(Khmer Rouge Zones before 1975) and “new citizens”-(cities/deportes) were marked to die.
Below is listed the death count for both the base and new citizens
I am going to pause really fast before finishing and ask you to remember that these numbers on this graph aren’t just numbers. These numbers show for the lives of people. Families had loved ones torn from their grasps, never to see them again. There is a lot of grief and hurt in all of this.
In January 1979, the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia and drove out the Khmer Rouge. They then withdrew in 1989 after training a new Cambodian army that succeeded in defending the country on its own. Finally in 1991, the genocide was made known in an official international arena. The genocide was hidden so long because there were a few leaders that were still allegiant to the Regime. But, treason and paranoia led to the final downfall of the Khmer Rouge leaders. This was the last straw that tore apart the Khmer Rouge Regime. In 2007, justice was repaid for the crimes that were carried out.
I know that all of this was so much information and if you made it this far, thank you! Thank you for giving up your time to read this. I am asking that you would pray for the lives that we will be in contact with over these next 3 months, the squad to adjust well to the newness of the culture and language, and for us to display Christ in all we do.
